There are multiple clinical terminologies in the healthcare industry in use. Each different set of clinical terms are associated with a set of pre-coordinated, free text patient problems. These sets of patient problems are further associated with their own either implicit or explicit terminology models. A problem arises when different participants in the healthcare industry want to communicate with one another. Generally, the problems in one healthcare system can neither be understood nor mapped for use by a second different healthcare system in any objective way, except through communication between problem terminology developers associated with their respective healthcare system. These developers understand the meaning of their own patient problems. However, even then, direct equivalence is often not possible.
While, Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) systems may use these terminologies, these systems do not utilize a model-based implementation. The international nursing informatics community has supported the development of models describing patient diagnoses and clinical actions. These models are described by the International Organization of Standards (ISO) in document ISO 18104:2003. The International Council of Nurses (ICN) conforms to these ISO nursing models with the International Classification of Nursing Practice (ICNP), which is described as a 7 Axis Model in ICNP Version 1.0 (see http://www.icn.ch/icnp.htm). Deficiencies associated with known systems include:                Patient diagnoses/problems which are not sufficiently described to enable their use within an operational HIT solution, such as an interdisciplinary plan of care application. Publicly available industry models have insufficient specificity of detailed attributes to fully support application requirements and insufficient supporting attribute properties to define application and user interface behavior.        Inability, by HIT systems, to decompose problems into a consistent, unambiguous, and computable definition, which enables secondary data use based on specific problem characteristics. Simple text expression of a Patient problem is insufficient to support optimizing clinical practice for individual patients at the point of care, as well as managing clinical outcomes for patient behavior in the aggregate.Thus, in known systems, data is not easily shared across systems that do not use common and semantically consistent definitions. These systems do not include standard models to help promote consistent data usage across a healthcare enterprise or different enterprises. A system according to invention principles addresses these deficiencies and related problems.        